Jobs and immigration detention in Etowah County (opinion from Mark Dow)

At a time when jobs and illegal immigration are on everyone's mind, a national coalition called the Detention Watch Network has had the audacity to suggest that the immigration wing of the Etowah County Detention Center be shut down.

It's about time.

When I visited the Etowah jail more than a decade ago, one correctional officer told me how glad she was that the jail had job openings when the Goodyear plant in Gadsden was laying people off. The jail was about to begin an $8.4-million expansion to accommodate immigration detainees.

Around the country for decades now, jails have been keeping busted factory towns afloat. In 1996, President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich ushered in new immigration laws that would lead to the detention and deportation of hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions by now -- of lawful U.S. residents. The laws have made an overcrowded immigration detention regime even more unmanageable while providing steady revenue from the feds (that is, taxpayers) to hundreds of jails and several private prison companies.

The Obama administration and ICE Director John Morton, while detaining and deporting in record numbers, have talked about reforming the ICE detention system. Some of this is just talk, and some of it is sincere. Either way, reform can't work, and Washington bureaucrats have long been out of touch with what really goes on in their immigration lock-ups.

The possibility of detention reform did briefly hold some promise. For those who have followed the issue for a long time, it was stunning in 2009 to hear ICE acknowledge the founding flaw in its regime: that the prisons and jails holding most of its detainees (some 35,000 on a given day) are "largely designed for penal, not civil, detention."

But the idea that ICE can fix this problem is misguided. ICE had already demonstrated that it cannot run a detention system humanely or transparently. As a law enforcement agency, ICE cannot operate a non-penal housing system. Besides, ICE should not have the authority to be police, judge, jury and jailer -- but it does.

Another unsolvable problem is that the ICE detention system has never really been a system at all. It is an ad hoc and usually incompetent effort to ensure budget allocations and to incarcerate non-citizens in accordance with politicians' latest scare tactics.

Go to the ICE website or Facebook page -- the PR is better than ever -- and you can read about the dangerous "criminal aliens" being removed. You won't find out that most of the husbands, wives, parents and children being banished have been convicted of minor crimes; or that ICE can deport someone for being charged with a crime, even if there is no conviction; or that some of those detained and deported were not charged with a crime at all.

ICE claims that it's moving toward a less "penal" version of detention. But at Etowah -- and so many other ICE and ICE-contracted jails -- the "administrative" detainees wear jail uniforms, are forbidden from having in-person visits with family members, face retaliation for complaining about inedible food, and get no sunlight.

According to ICE, none of this amounts to "punishment." But once they're imprisoned, the "detainees" will be treated as prisoners. Referring to a jail cell as "detention" does not change that.

"Reforms," even well-intended, will lose out to the twin realities of jail life and politics.

Not long ago, probably as a result of continued detainee and advocacy pressures, ICE tried to close down its operation in Etowah. Alabama U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt, whose district includes Gadsden, reportedly used his chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Homeland Security to keep revenue in his district by threatening ICE's budget if it took its operations out of Gadsden.

I asked Aderholt's office for a response to that report. I also asked when he had last visited the Etowah detention center and spoken to detainees there. His communications director told me that she "wasn't able to get anything from the Congressman."

Aderholt deserves criticism, but he was just doing what politicians do: pretending to care about things like immigration and national security while directing funds to where the voters are.

But who really benefits?

Down near the bottom of the food chain, Sheriff Todd Entrekin will try to comply with ICE requirements by cutting corrections officers' sick days and vacation time, according to the Gadsden Times.

Underpaid and overworked corrections staff are more likely to mistreat the prisoners in their custody. In fact, ICE detainee protests have sometimes demanded better treatment for their guards. And the most damning criticism of immigration detention I've heard didn't come from detainees or from reports like those from the Detention Watch Network.

It came from wardens and correctional officers. These men and women understand more clearly than anyone that the immigration detention system has inhumane treatment built into it. A detention enforcement officer in Miami once told me that officers were encouraged to look even at asylum-seekers as possible murderers.

"You're brainwashed," he explained, to believe "these are all scumbag inmates."

The detention officer ended up doing time himself after he beat down an immigrant detainee. Only when he was wearing the other uniform, he told me, did he finally understand that mistreatment is endemic to the system.

A Louisiana warden with immigrant detainees in his jail told me he knew that many of them shouldn't be locked up. He told me he knew that young corrections officers had no choice but to show the prisoners who was boss -- and that violence was the inevitable result. The warden also told me he was glad he'd been able to help bring the jail to his town because people needed jobs.

Last month, Goodyear announced reductions in production at all its plants, including the one in Gadsden.

At Etowah, the writing was already on the wall when I was there years ago: an article from Corrections Technology and Management was pinned to the staff bulletin board. Titled "Where Did All the Immigrants Go? Jail Profits Leave with [Immigrant] Detainees," it told a cautionary tale of a New Hampshire jail that had lost its contract with the immigration service after repeated reports of prisoner mistreatment.

The paradox of immigration detention is that, in this economy, the guards and the guarded are on the same side.

The economy and immigration systems both need help. Inhumane, unnecessary detention isn't the right way to help either one.

Mark Dow is author of American Gulag: Inside US Immigration Prisons
(University of California), which was used as a resource by the
Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General in
its audits of detention centers. He teaches English at Hunter College
in New York. Email: mdow@igc.org